Let me show you how you can create a PowerBI.com account
using an email address which could be gmail,
outlook, hotmail, yahoo even aol. I'm not going to judge you my friend. So
you probably have tried this where you went to PowerBI.com and you clicked the
start free or try free and eventually got to this
which said hey to get started enter your work email address and
well you know you maybe tried your gmail.com. Only
to get this message that it didn't work so we're going to show you
the best workaround for this and how you can get started here.
So leave a comment after you watch this video
and let us know if this workaround worked for you
or not. I'm Avi Singh a Microsoft MVP and best-selling Power BI author
and if you want to become a Power BI Pro make sure to subscribe and click that
bell so you are notified whenever I go live
to answer your Power BI questions. All right, so let's
get started and look at what this workaround is but before that let's take
a step back and I just want to make sure that we're
all on the same page. So first of all let's make sure we understand
that power bi desktop is always free powerbi.com account is also free
but with a work email and that's what we're going to talk about
now there is powerbi.com pro which is a paid license and premium
which is something different so in this video we will be talking about this one
then how do you get around this if you don't have a work email
if you just have a gmail address how do you create a power bi.com account
now if you are more interested in power bi desktop then i would highly recommend
or maybe you're just you know kind of getting started with power bi or if you
keep getting stuck then i would recommend to check out our
number one ranked power bi tutorial and we're going to link it in the corner
and in the description below we also have a video specifically
talking about licensing and pro and premium and everything
we're going to cover that later so let's get in here and
let's see how we can solve this problem again
if you try it with gmail.com it doesn't work so we're going to solve it using
this three-step approach and i guarantee that
this is only going to take you about 15 minutes worth of effort now as
i take you through these steps i'm going to show step by step i'm also going to
going to be sharing some useful tips now
uh there is or there may even be a faster method which unfortunately i
only discovered after i had recorded the steps for this
video but i will tell you about it in the bonus section
at the end of the video so make sure to hold on for that
now as for this video and these steps what i would recommend
is that you watch it twice the first time i just want you to watch the whole
video and decide whether this is an option for you or not and if you decide
this is an option then you can come back and
watch the video and follow along step by step as you go through the steps
and of course pausing as much as you need
now as you can see here our first step is getting a domain name
now here what i'm going to say is that if you are maybe between jobs or if
you're a freelancer hey you are pretty much your own company
so getting a domain may even be a good idea
anyway now if this topic is of interest to you about becoming a power bi
consultant or growing your power bi consulting business
then do check out our playlist on on on that specific topic
and we are going to be adding more videos to that and we're also looking
for ideas from you to add more videos on that so
again the links are in the corner and in the description below okay so
let's get started with our three-step process and the
first step is getting a domain name it's going to
cost you almost next to nothing the site that i would recommend is
namecheap.com now folks i don't get paid by them i'm just a happy
happy customer for one i would say avoid godaddy if you can
i just haven't had a great experience with them namecheap is really simple
really works and they got a great support team
all right so you're going to go to the website you're going to search for a
domain name in this case i'm searching for power bi bizhelp.com
and my tip here is going to be that don't
obsess over getting the right domain this is just for getting an
account on powerbi.com you can always come back
and get the domain name that you really like or really love
after you've given it a lot of thought especially if you're
going on the path of becoming a power bi consultant
so you search for the domain name find one that is available you know you add
to cart and you complete the purchase here the
tip i'm going to share with you is that on this page you might
notice the promo code if you are interested just google name
cheap coupons they have monthly coupons running all
the time and they save you not that much but hey every penny counts
right so if you're interested then just google namecheap coupon and
they always have an active coupon so now that now with
your domain name set up we're on to step two which is to set up the email
forwarding for your domain for this i would like
you to google just the words name cheap email
forwarding and that should lead you to a full
article which shows you step by step exactly what you need to do now hey
since we're here i'm just going to cover you and show you the steps
for one to emphasize how easy it is so in namecheap once you have the domain
you're going to click manage for that domain
and then you want to go to the advanced dns tab
at the top and within there find the mail settings and change that to
email forwarding and make sure to click save
all changes after that go back to the main
domain tab and in there you should see a section
which says redirect email here you should click add forwarder and now
this is where you can specify an alias so you already have the domain
name powerbi bizhelp.com and in this case i'm specifying an alias
which is just my name avi so that would essentially give me an
email address avi at power bi bizhelp.com and then i
specify where do i want it forward to and of
course here's in this case i'm using a gmail address
but you can use your outlook yahoo whatever you have right
so uh and of course make sure to check the box at the end
so in the next step we're going to be using this email address to sign up for
power bi now although there might be a pause
here as namecheap says that it may take up to an hour to for this email
forwarding to be set up now while you're taking a break might as
well check out this new site power bi bizhelp.com
this is actually a new site that we set up to offer free power bi help to
businesses impacted by kobe 19 crisis so maybe just
take a second and navigate to the site and find out more
details and of course if you qualify then reach out to um you know reach out
to us using the options on that page okay so
uh at this point i'm gonna also gonna share some tips with you so
my first tip here is it's actually possible to set up
multiple forwarding emails in this manner just as you did in fact
if you look at namecheap documentation they mentioned that you can
it's possible to set up up to 100 forwarding email addresses and
theoretically you could use each one of them to create a free power
bi.com account and the next tip is that if you're
testing the email forwarding then make sure to
use a different email address so don't send
the you know the test email to let's say avi at powerbib.com from that gmail
address namecheap specifically says that that
probably would not gonna work so find something else maybe
you know outlook address or something like that to test that
okay so with that let's move ahead with step three
which is using this domain email address to create power bi account
and this is the standard power bi creation but now you're over this
roadblock so this is the part where we're getting stuck
where it said hey you have to enter your work email address hey friends found
your chest and proudly enter your newly created domain email
address now this time it might ask you to verify identity this
may change based on location but it did ask me to do this
it asks you one more time did you get your email address from your company
again proudly click yes to that because again
if you're a freelancer or between jobs i say your euro
your company of your own and here creating account
is this section that is where our email forwarding helps us out
because it's going to tell you that hey we have sent a verification code to the
email address you specified to the work email
and you need to enter that in all you have to do is well at least in my case
it was being forwarded to my gmail address so i popped over to my gmail
and copied the verification code and entered in it
okay that was my daughter who parched in okay
all right let's keep going uh and yeah next asking invite more people which i
just skipped and voila you are into powerbi.com
so there you go folks you have seen the steps here now i had promised
that bonus in the end i'm going to cover possibly an
even faster method uh but um you know just a reminder
that again if you're interested in power via desktop check out the desktop
tutorial which i had linked earlier and i
promised this one if you're interested more to learn about the pro and the
licensing premium how does that work we're going to link to that video right
now in the corner and of course all the links in the description
and again a reminder that we also um have the
power bi consultant playlist which we would like you to check it out
okay so what is this faster method again folks i discovered this only after we
had recorded the the steps for this uh the process
and uh frankly i'm not sure if this is faster and
you know i i do like the domain method because uh that
again if you're going on this path getting a domain name might be a good
idea anyway all right but this pat this
option comes from uh you know our favorite folks
gyneco and their suggestion is that you can also
accomplish this by signing up for an office 365 enterprise trial and the
easiest way that i found was to just google
office 365 enterprise ignore the ads at the top
and just look for something that says compare office 365
enterprise options and that should show you the options
and i think you can make this happen either by signing up for the e3 or the
e5 but hey if it's a free trial might as
well sign up for the e5 so and basically what this does is sets
up an account for you with like an onmicrosoft.com email address now if you
do want to watch more step by step in more detail i'll
link to uh the gynecube original video which
covers this in more detail hey folks so we are always looking for new topics to
cover so let us know what's going to help you
and we'll be happy to create videos on that and of course make sure to join
us live for our talk power bi q a as well you can find out more
information at click to talkpowerbi.com our next videos
and make sure to subscribe and until next time power on
you